


This Ain't No Hymn

by HighVelocity



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 00:34:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6172987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HighVelocity/pseuds/HighVelocity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Late night ruminations by Venom Snake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Ain't No Hymn

_He is hers, and she is his._

There is a peculiar sweetness about the fact that she, the enemy - or once the enemy - is fully his in a way they don't, or can't define. There is a recklessness, a deliberate risk that he takes in his protectiveness of her, an irony in the fact that a monster is defended by its prey.

But he is no paragon, either. He is littered with scars and he carries the pieces of the lost within him. He remembers the weight of the lives he's taken, and they are heavy. He maintains his silence and lets the world mistake it for anger, for revenge. What he feels... truthfully, what he does feel is a mystery.

He lets it be so. His XOs may know differently, but they keep their secrets, too. They've done well. They've done very well but he suffers moments where another arm, another hand, another set of skills supercedes what he knows, just for a heartbeat, and he has the dizzying sensation of watching the world through two distinct sets of eyes. Between one beat and the next, his entire sensation of self judders at the foundations, and then... seamlessly snaps back together again.

And the world goes on around him, this microcosm that is Mother Base, holding trophies on her shoulders and secrets within her belly. Secrets like Huey Emmerich. Secrets like Quiet, wandering Mother Base, shadowing him when he walks the proverbial battlements.

Venom Snake doesn't need to be told she's there. He knows. There are moments when he feels the electric sense of her filling a space beside him- a kind of warmth that comes from the absence of moving air, and he fights to hide a smile. When she vanishes away, as silently as she'd come, he knows he will find her gently kicking her legs in the air on her cot, seemingly content to spend time in her cell, music washing over her.

She never spends too long. He knows it's because a shift has changed, or guards have wandered from her cell that Quiet herself wanders, seeking him out for a moment or two of companionship. They acknowledge that her confinement measures are a sham, and that Quiet stays where she is out of courtesy to the Diamond Dogs. It's symbolic, her remaining there. It's her way of telling him what he needs to know.

He's earned her trust, and she has earned his, this small precious thing they cradle between them in the silence. She speaks with her body and fans the embers that sit low in his belly, reminding him that what they have is something that belongs to them, and them alone. He sometimes wonders if _she_ wonders about his motives; if she'd ever questioned them, if she'd ever taken advantage of them. Even with her body turned to him in open communication, in the chopper, she is more of the wild wolf than DD ever is - animalistic, unreadable.

DD loves him with all the truth and eagerness an animal possesses. But Quiet? Quiet could lie. Lie by ommision, lie deliberately, lie completely by her lack of words, allowing people to overreach themselves in their assumptions of her motives and her thoughts. In this, she was an _excellent_ liar.

The question was - how much of it was an act, and how much of it honest gratitude? Venom Snake reads microexpressions and body language well enough, but Quiet's... see, he reads honesty from them now. She drops barriers just so she can speak to him in the only way she can.

He could be biased, it is true, and in the early days, Quiet's coldness masked it all underneath the veneer of cooperation, a desire to get close to him; an opportunity seized. Yet she'd raised a gun to her own head when he'd dropped his, unwilling and unable to pull the trigger. Too weak from the battle, did she think she had failed again in her assigned task?

Had she been completely mission-focussed, she could so easily have spoken to him, made contact with him, spread the parasites. He, then, could have become the vector of infection, unknowingly bringing it onto Mother Base, and from there it would've spread. But no, she'd kept her silence, announcing her presence with the thundering boom of her sniper rifle. She'd played a deadly little game with him, ending in her defeat and her willing surrender.

He thinks of her cool weight across his shoulders, the soft yielding of flesh and slack muscle. Skin warming in contact with his. She's no slouch, he's witnessed this firsthand, but she lets him take liberties with her that she will not suffer from anyone else.

Why?

Just an act?

If that were so, if eliminating him was one of her objectives - why the fighter jet, when it accosted them on their way back to Mother Base? Was it Skull Face, Cipher manipulating the situation to plant her more securely among them? The Soviets tailing them and sheer, bad luck that the jet caught up to them in the midst of the great, wide ocean? Either way, in that case he would've been out of the picture and Diamond Dogs would've been left scrambling to catch up to Cipher _and_ Skull Face, giving them enough time to set their plans into motion.

If it were simple self-preservation on Quiet's behalf - it was expensive, and a terrible gamble even if it worked out in her favour. Using him, his hesitation, to get herself onto Mother Base... and the parasites. Banking hard on him, then, and given her abilities it would've been near pointless to engage in a firefight - Diamond Dogs would've lost a great many men because Quiet would've gone down hard, and she would've spared no quarter.

Well, it did rankle him still. But that was always easily drowned out by the memory of the starry look in her eyes, the sweet, girlish way she gazed at him in the chopper. The sulky pouts, the questioning glances, the contemplative times when her eyes glazed over just a fraction, and he knew Quiet was lost in thought.

Not least of all, the seductive playfulness; Pequod's silent amusement at those times was very nearly tangible. He'd burned with embarassment the first time and had to look away, while Quiet smirked in satisfaction. When they'd disembarked, when he'd run into Pequod a little later, the pilot had chuckled softly and nodded, then snapped off a smart salute. That secret was safe with him. Pequod tolerated - no, lately he'd _welcomed_ her frank curiousity in the cockpit, and it made Venom Snake smile to notice how Pequod sometimes made little detours along his flight path, worldlessly pointing out something new and interesting to Quiet. She flashed him small smiles and nods in turn.

It heartened Venom Snake to see that Quiet at least had someone she could call an ally, if not a friend. He, he was biased. He probably should not count.

Funny how ' _that's the sniper, Quiet. She was the one that attacked you at Cyprus_ ' did not bring the sort of vengeful anger he expected it to. Rather, what he'd held was respect, a wary sort of affection and a curiousity that she had returned. Didn't matter how it was spun, an XOF assassin with parasite-granted abilities was something that could only mean ill, but within that framework of suspicion and threat he and Quiet had still managed to forge a bond.

Love was not a word that crossed his mind easily, let alone his lips, but what they had, what they shared, it was close. It was damned close.

The wind blusters between them and Quiet shifts beside him at the railing. Venom Snake exhales softly through his nostrils and feels her move away. She tweaks a strap of his pack in goodbye, and he inclines his head.

He trusts her, and she trusts him. He is hers, and she is his. The day may yet come when they may have to point their weapons at each other, and squeeze the triggers, and leave the best of them to stand - but that day is one that he feels lies in a far-off future. It's a day that he feels will never come. Not really. Some long-written story in his bones tells him that all will end in ashes and ruin, but until then...

Venom Snake pulls out a cigar - not a proper one, but the infamous phantom cigar given to him to use in lieu of a proper one, damn his 'medical conditions' - and goes through the motions of lighting it, tuning out for a moment of peace. Only the cool ocean air touches his skin, instead of Quiet's presence, and he makes a note to visit her later in the night.

He has a new cassette tape for her.

**Author's Note:**

> #PequodisaNationalTreasure He and Quiet are totally friends I'm calling it
> 
> Title from 'This Ain't No Hymn' by Saint Saviour. In fact, the whole song seems rather telling of MGSV:TPP itself, so I definitely recommend searching it up, lyrics and all.


End file.
